


how i lost me and you lost you

by dangercupcake



Category: Stardew Valley (Video Game)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Children, Divorce, Other, Post-Divorce
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-28
Updated: 2017-10-28
Packaged: 2019-01-25 08:22:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12527104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dangercupcake/pseuds/dangercupcake
Summary: You go to Lewis’s house. You sign the ledger. You pay your gold.





	how i lost me and you lost you

You listen to the baby upstairs. She’s making noises to herself and sounds so happy. Meanwhile there is a literal gulf between you and Shane, and you’re happy for it; he didn’t shower before he came to bed, and he smells like microwaved pepper poppers and warm beer.

You didn’t sign up for this. Because Pelican Town is so weird, you didn’t even sign up for “in sickness or in health”—which you’re thinking now maybe Shane would have thought twice about. He had stopped drinking, he had been going to therapy, he had been attentive and sweet. You’d been suckered.

This, you think to yourself, is not the first time an alcoholic has suckered you. But it’s the first time you’ve gone into it with your eyes wide open. You hadn’t had a real choice with your parents. You have a real choice now. You have a real choice for your baby. You just have to make it.

You make it right then, except it takes you a full season to say it out loud. It’s almost winter when you roll over in bed and ignore the smell of Joja special sauce and say, “I think I want a divorce.”

**

Shane doesn’t even wait for whatever weird Pelican Town ritual serves for divorce (writing that you’re divorced in the mayor’s ledger, it turns out, and paying some money that you can easily afford these days, even with how easy you’re taking it now that you’re being more careful with yourself because you have Majandra to think about). He literally gets out of bed that moment in the freezing cold air and yells, “I knew you wanted to get rid of me!” and shoves the bed. He leaves with his backpack full of beer—the cheap canned stuff, none of the good homebrew you’ve made—in his hoodie and a pair of shorts.

This is not how you pictured it going and yet at the same time you feel like you really should have known better.

The next day it snows, even though winter hasn’t properly started yet. You wonder if you’ll see winter forage if you go out. Majandra is crawling. You set her up with Cat and Dog and go outside to take care of the animals. Without Shane helping with the chickens, rabbits, and ducks, it takes until almost noon—but Shane hasn’t helped with them since the end of summer, and almost always finished by saying how much he missed the chickens at Marnie’s. 

_Well, go visit Marnie and Jas_ , you always wanted to snap. _They’re right down the farm._ Funny how well his legs worked to get him twice as far to the bar, but never to his aunt and cousin.

You rest a little and play with Majandra. It’s her lunch time and you feed her good food that you grew yourself with your own hands. You take pictures of her for the Instagram your parents follow, and some of your friends back in the city. You’re the first one to have a baby, but no one wants to make the long trip to the valley to see her. You can’t blame them; if you were still living in the city, dealing with all the Joja dead-end life shit, you wouldn’t want to drag your ass to the end of nowhere and sleep in a twin-bed in a poorly heated farmhouse just to see a baby that can’t talk yet either. 

“People’s priorities are just wrong,” you say to Majandra in sing-song voice, and feed her another spoonful of yams. She smashes her hand down in the bowl and Dog jumps up to lick everything clean. You let it go. Way worse germs happen when Majandra eats the fertilizer when she helps you plant.

**

You pack Majandra up and go visiting for the afternoon. You take your fishing pole, too. And your backpack—you never know what you’ll forage. Maybe the last of the fall mushrooms. They’re so tough, they’re perfect for Majandra to gum on.

You swing up your one extra bag, too, that you’ve packed full of Shane’s clothes, winter boots, the science fiction book he borrowed off your shelves and had seemingly been reading little by little for the last six months. Like, a paragraph at a time, but last month he’d made a joke about it, so he _had_ been reading it.

The mermaid pendant you’d given him had been tucked inside his old Joja uniform. You include both of those things in the bag.

**

Your first stop is Marnie’s place. She’s surprised when you ask if she’s seen Shane. 

“Not since the bar Friday night,” she tells you.

“We, uh,” you say. “We’re probably divorcing. He left last night, but didn’t take much of his stuff. I thought he’d come here.”

“What? Dear, a divorce? But the baby!” She chucks Majandra under the chin. “That’s terrible.”

“He has a lot of problems, Marnie,” you say to unhearing ears.

“I’ll take his bag. He’ll be back soon, I’m sure,” she says. “He probably slept at a friend’s house last night.”

_But he has no friends,_ you say silently.

“Great,” you say out loud. “That sounds perfect.”

Stop number two is to see Leah and give her a hunk of goat cheese from your backpack. You could have gone there first, but you knew you’d need cheering up after Marnie, who, even though you’ve lived in the valley for three years, still doesn’t like you and you can’t figure out why. 

Leah, of course, is delighted to see you and the baby, to show you her art, and to share the goat cheese on crackers with glasses of peach juice she’s made from some of the peaches you’d given her in the summer that she froze and thawed just this morning. It’s a nice visit, but for some reason, you don’t mention Shane. You just play with Majandra’s toes, and soak in Leah’s friendship.

Stop number three is to see Kent. You have some extra fiddlehead risotto and you know he loves it. He’s just standing in his living room, staring outside, so you wave and walk right in. He doesn’t even notice you until you jiggle his arm and hand him the Tupperware. Poor guy. You kind of get it about his PTSD. You wish you could subtly mention that you know a few good therapists, but you couldn’t even get your husband to go to therapy. You’re not going to try to get a guy you’re friendly acquaintances with to go. Plus Jodi is really high strung. You duck out before she sees you.

You really want to fish, but the only place you can think of where Shane might have gone last night is the clinic. He sort of bonded with Harvey the night you had to bring him there after he drank so much he needed to be rehydrated, when he started going to therapy in the city once a week. Maybe he went there and stayed on one of the clinic’s beds. You just want to know he didn’t freeze to death, and tell him where his stuff is.

“Harvey,” you call out, but the clinic seems empty. You’re not good enough friends with Harvey to go into his bedroom. Sometimes you buy him a cup of coffee at the bar, but usually when you try to give him a gift, like goat cheese (you give everyone goat cheese, your goats are amazing), he tells you it’s not healthy. Like coffee is so healthy? Screw you, Harvey.

You peek around the swinging door and there are Shane’s sneakers. You take a deep breath. 

“Shane,” you say.

“Go away,” he says. “I don’t want to talk to you.”

“Your stuff is with Marnie. Clothes. Books. You don’t have to sleep here. She still has your room set up.”

“It’s none of your business. Go away.”

“I just want to make sure you’re okay.” You shift from foot to foot. “Do you want to say hi to Majandra?”

“No. Go away.”

Oh, that hurts. He’d been the one to ask you if you wanted to have a baby, shy and quietly excited, although the more pregnant you got, the less interested he got, and when Majandra was finally born, he looked at her like he was _bored_ . . . and . . . well . . . and now this.

You pull out the Tupperware of pepper poppers that you’d made after lunch. They’d be perfectly soggy now, just the way he likes them. You go to leave them on the side table and he snaps: “I don’t want your gift.”

“They’ll just go to waste,” you say. No one else likes pepper poppers. You hate them. You can’t think of anyone else to give them to.

“Then throw them away.”

You leave them on the side table. 

**

It’s dark, and Majandra’s sleeping in her little pack, all wrapped up in her blankets. You pull the blanket up and over her face. It’s snowing and you want her to stay warm. It falls back again when you stoop to pick up the three crystal fruit you find on the road to your farm. She was born with dark brown hair like yours, but it’s got a purple tint to it, especially in the light of your glow ring. She doesn’t have your high nose or shaped lips—she looks Anglo. She looks like Shane. 

This isn’t a _bad_ thing. She’s a super cute baby. And you love her already, so much. You loved her as soon as you heard her heartbeat at the obstetrician in Zuzu City. Such a cliché, and yet you know clichés are that for a reason. You have a stretch mark on your belly now in the shape of her foot from where she pressed so hard. You hope it never goes away. 

Before you collapse from exhaustion, you wrangle her crib from upstairs, and put it next to your bed. You always hated having it so far away from you, and now she’s not. The crib is just a formality—she’s already learned how to climb out of it and give you a heart attack.

You finally go to sleep and it’s almost two, but it’s worth it when you wake up to her counting her toes on your bed.

**

Majandra rolls around in the dirt in the greenhouse while you do some much-needed maintenance. You pull out all your pepper plants. No—wait. You leave one, because sometimes George needs peppers, and whatever he doesn’t need, you can make pepper jelly from. Your mom had been delighted by the pepper jelly you’d sent for the holidays last year. Or maybe she’d been delighted by the ribbons you’d tied around the little cut-glass jars. Hard to tell with Mom.

Dog helps dig so you end up with more of a mess than you were expecting. You’d had a cat. Shane had wanted a dog. You couldn’t say no to anything Shane wanted because above all you’d wanted him to be happy. You’d wanted him to quit that awful Joja job and hang out with chickens and goats all day and visit with Jas whenever he wanted. But he’d—

Yoba, shut _up_ , brain.

Everywhere there had been peppers, you plant seeds for star fruit. You might as well get some good wine out of this. In fact . . . You stand up and crack your back as you survey the greenhouse. If you pull out all the tomatoes, all the eggplant . . . what’s even the point? You’ve jarred and canned so much. Why bother with more? Your shelves are full at this point. This winter should be a winter of star fruit and making bank on star fruit wine. The more money you can put aside, the better. Especially now that you’re working the farm yourself and the animals take half the day even when the sheep don’t need to be shorn.

That’s it, you decide. One more harvest for fresh fruit, and then you’ll plant star fruit for wine everywhere.

Majandra punctuates this for you by pulling out an entire yam plant and trying to eat it, roots and all.

**

Mayor Lewis drops by on Day 2 of Winter, hat in hand. You’ve already done the animals for the day and now you’re taking a break. You sit down with him at the table, hot cups of coffee in hand, a plate of Evelyn’s cookies on the table. He has Majandra on his knee. 

“I . . .” He clears his throat uncomfortably. “I came because I heard about you and Shane. Is it serious?”

“He’s not talking to me anymore, so . . . yeah.” You take a sip of coffee. You gave the last of the milk to Lewis and you’re drinking yours black. It’s delicious, but it makes you want to get up and work, not sit still.

“If you want to make it official, you just need to come write it in my ledger.”

“Is there a time limit on that?”

“Well . . . no, but I thought you’d want to do it as soon as possible so you can date other people.”

You raise your eyebrows. “My husband just left. I have a baby. I’m not thinking about dating other people, I’m thinking about getting my farm through the winter.”

“Oh, well . . .” He clears his throat again. “Well,” he repeats. “If you want to give bouquets to anyone else, you have to be properly divorced first or it won’t look right to the rest of the town.”

“Is this about money?” you ask bluntly.

Lewis doesn’t look shocked enough.

“Let me donate some gold to the town,” you say. “I love it here. I would love to donate to the town’s coffers for—the winter—uh—festival—the festival of winter—the—”

“The Festival of Ice _and_ the Feast of the Winter Star?” says Lewis. “Oh, but you can’t possibly.”

“I would love to,” you say drily, and get out your walking-around purse. “How does fifty thousand gold sound?”

You make Lewis write you out a receipt, but he stays for a second cup of coffee and even eats some cookies without ever mentioning the word divorce again. Or the word ledger. You have a feeling your reputation in this town will suddenly skyrocket and even Caroline and Marnie might suddenly start to feel warm toward you with Lewis’s approval. 

That much coffee gives you a buzz you can’t shake off, but instead of going to the mines like you normally would, you pull out your old tablet and do baby yoga with Majandra. You can’t go to the mines anymore; there’s no one to stay with Majandra while you go (drunk _or_ sober) and no one to take care of her if you die down there. Die for real. Because you could, and you have to think about that now.

But you don’t think about it. You let your tablet stream baby yoga on the shitty 3g Pelican Town gets and you listen to your daughter laugh. 

**

Friday you stop into the bar and buy everyone a round. Harvey gets coffee. Everyone says hi to Majandra. It’s wonderful—except for Shane, who stomps out of the bar when he sees you come in. 

“Just ignore him,” Sebastian tells you. “He’s always had a bad attitude.”

Like you didn’t fall in love with and marry that bad attitude two years ago? Sebastian is in another world.

“And I’m going to teach you how to do a kick flip,” Sam tells Majandra seriously, holding her so they’re face to face. She blinks at him slowly, sucking on her binky. “Just wait.”

“Do you have anything to eat?” asks Abigail.

**

All you need to complete the community center is a sandfish, an eel, and a catfish. You should be fishing as much as you can. Instead, you’re letting the greenhouse take care of itself, and spending lazy afternoons playing with Majandra. You’re worried she’s not as verbal as she should be, because you spend your nights reading mommy blogs and drinking the cranberry wine that you aged to gold star. It’s still just cranberry wine, but it’s nice on a winter nice. 

You should probably sell it, you think at one point, and that just makes you keep the rest of the stock. You’re selling the starfruit wine, which you don’t even like. And you have a nice cushion, almost nine hundred thousand gold. You’re doing fine. You’re just freaking out because you’re alone. 

“Stop reading mommy blogs,” you order yourself, and pull up your Kindle app. No one else in the valley seems to read e-books—or maybe they just don’t talk about it with you. They seem really averse to keeping up with whatever’s going on “in the city”—even the sports. You went to see a gridball game with Shane once, but whenever you brought up going to another one, he shrugged you off. Even Alex doesn’t seem really interested in leaving the valley much. 

It _is_ a long ride to the city. But there are other cities, too. Other places no one ever talks about. Places you might like to take Majandra. Things you might like to do. Museums. Aquariums. Amusement parks for when she’s older. 

You swear to yourself that Majandra is never going to be like Penny, stuck here in Pelican Town with no hope for getting out and no willingness to do anything to make her own life better.

You swear to yourself that Majandra is never going to be like Shane, stuck here in Pelican Town, refusing to grab hold of good things when they come his way because . . . he doesn’t think he deserves them. Because he hates himself. And he never stopped hating himself. And you married him anyway because you thought you could fix him with enough love, even though you knew that wasn’t how it worked.

**

You see Shane around town. It’s so hard. You still _love him_. It’s not like you stopped loving him. But your marriage was ridiculous. He never touched you. He always smelled like beer. He never talked to you. He never went to therapy but he pretended he did, like you’re too dumb to know the difference between going to therapy and going into the woods to drink.

He drank when he was supposed to be caring for your _child_. 

Did he even care about Majandra? You couldn’t tell. You didn’t think so.

You couldn’t tell.

Did he even care about you?

Alcoholics can’t care about people. They only care about drinking. You have to remind yourself of that. Shane kept saying he was going to stop but he never tried to be in recovery. He never made the effort. Even after that scary night on the cliffs, he just went right back to drinking like nothing had happened. 

Maybe for him nothing had happened. Maybe that was par for the course for him.

It was kind of par for the course for you. Not the first time an alcoholic had threatened to kill himself in front of you. Your dad had even tried. You dialed 911 in time, though. 

Pelican Town doesn’t have a 911. Just you, with Shane’s arm around your shoulders, stumbling through the woods to Harvey’s office, waking him up.

Your dad has scars but Shane had nothing to remind him of that night except some lingering embarrassment the next day.

Your dad hadn’t stopped drinking either. Neither had your mom. Not until years later. You can’t wait for Shane until he’s in his fifties. Or however old. You can’t wait for him. Period. You can’t wait for him to love himself. To decide for himself that he loves himself enough to stop drinking.

You love yourself too much. Yourself and Majandra.

Her hair is definitely going to be purple like Shane’s. Her eyes are hazel like yours, though. And her skin is a smooth, even brown. And she loves baby yoga and she loves when you read to her. She definitely your kid. You don’t regret what you and Shane made. You don’t regret your choices. 

**

You go to Lewis’s house. You sign the ledger. You pay your gold. 

You run into Emily on your way home, and she dances for you and Majandra. She’s amazing. You give her some fabric you wove yourself, and some goat cheese, and she kisses you on the cheek. Your heart feels open—you’re not divorcing the whole valley, Shane can glare at you all he wants. 

You stop by Marnie. You want Majandra to know her great-aunt. She’s cool to you but she loves Majandra and so does Jas. You leave before Shane gets home from Joja. He’s working there again. Marnie mentions it without you asking.

You don’t make any sarcastic remarks. Shane hated working at Joja but he loved hating it. Without hating it all day, he had no idea what to do with himself.

You wish you could cut down some trees and bring the wood home with you, but not with Majandra. It’s not safe. Maybe one of these days Marnie will watch her for an afternoon so you can do some chopping in the forest. You can craft indoors at night, while Majandra sleeps. 

**

You’re halfway through winter before you realize that you’re actually happy in the valley, with your farm and your child. You’re content. You’re settled. You wish some things could have been different, but you still wish that about your Joja job. This is . . . pretty great. Over by your bed, Majandra says, “Mama.” Your heart is full.


End file.
